...T+D magazine are about to observe 60th anniversary. The field that we serve has changed over six decades, but never as dramatically as in the past three years. The knowledge economy, the training supplier market boom, the corporate leadership crisis, and the rise of e-learning have all made their mark on the profession. What do leading thinkers in our field make of the situation? What's on their minds as the economy fizzles, corporate leaders do the perp walk, and technology encroaches on learning and work?

We asked six highly respected industry leaders--Warren Bennis, Warner Burke, Gloria Gery, Mat Juechter, Geary Rummler, and Noel Tichy--to share their thinking about the current situation and where the field should look for direction in the future.

T+D

What's most on your mind? What's intriguing you now? What are you keeping an eye on? What should we be alert to?

Burke I'm really interested in what's called tacit knowledge--how you draw out what people know but they can't articulate. That's highly relevant to the professional behavior of organization consultants. A lot of consultants' knowledge is tacit--that is, they can't quite tell you how they do what they do.

What will it take to make tacit knowledge useful? One, discovering new techniques for eliciting the knowledge that exists. There's research by Herb Simon based on his studies of master chess players. When asked, chess masters can't articulate how they play. Simon observed them for many hours and eventually determined patterns. That's an example of a third party eliciting knowledge that people don't know they have. In a graduate course I teach in which I send students out to do field work, I coach them by saying, "I'm not sure what it is I know, so you have to ask me questions to be sure that what comes out is useful to you." Knowing what questions to ask is very important.

A second interest of mine is the applicability of nonlinear, chaos-type theories to organizational change. I recently finished Organization Change: Theory and Practice, a book about nonlinear processes. The book's premise is that we plan organization change as if it's linear- step 1, step 2, phase 1, phase 2. But when the change actually happens, it's anything but linear. What we do in the organization change process is manage unanticipated consequences. The concept of change management is in part an oxymoron because you can't predict fully what's going to happen. What you really do is manage the consequences of the interventions that are made. That's far more important than the intervention itself, and it's a chaotic, nonlinear process.

A third concern is what I call the "juxtaposition of technology and business processes, plus culture change as exemplified by the recent acquisition by IBM of Pricewaterhouse-Coopers. They're trying to be a major player around technology and business processes, and I fear they'll end up ignoring culture. Fourth is organization design, particularly social network analysis, which is especially important since 9/11, and the "magic number of 150" as in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

Fifth are inter-organizational and intra-organizational issues. We're into a stage of organizational behavior that has to do with both. By intra, I mean putting units together in unique and different ways through strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, and so forth. Some of those ideas aren't new, but their applicability is new.

Juechter One thing on my mind a lot is what e-learning is doing to the context in which learning occurs. Take learning objects. There's a great deal in the literature right now about learning objects and what they're going to do, but I haven't seen any that deal with the context of the information that's included in the learning object. I don't like the idea of people learning things such as leadership skills without some kind of value-based context that talks about the appropriate use of techniques, as well as the techniques themselves. You can say the same thing about such mundane topics as selling skills. Without some contextual reference...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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